No deductions from what I do not post can possibly be valid. Perhaps I missed that point entirely; perhaps I choose not to address it from a lack of knowledge; perhaps my horoscope advised me not to concern myself with it. It would be the very height of error to derive information from the silences between my sentences.

I remember a thread, on snopes, many years ago, involving media bias. One of our correspondents was claiming evidence of media bias on the basis of which stories the press did not cover. Since, for every story a newspaper prints, there are assuredly thousands -- perhaps billions? -- that they do not, a full analysis of lacunae would be an absurd undertaking.

You might as well ask why I haven't mentioned anything about the guard dogs, and their peculiar behavior in the night-time.

We all have very mixed feelings about lying. We are, of course, against it and we tut-tut when the porky-pies of serial liars like Jeffrey Archer or Jonathan Aitken finally come to light. Yet, we also appreciate that social, political and financial worlds couldn't function without dollops of 'economy with the truth'. We are intrigued by poker players and detectives, whose lob it is to sort truth from falsehood. Yet we feel queasy about lie-detecting machines, such as the new American brain scan technique that claims to be able to spot 'guilty knowledge'.

As it turns out, we have deception hard-wired into our genes. We are all descended from hominids who were successful liars. "One of the reasons that we have such big brains is because we are good at deceiving each other," says Dr Richard Byrne of St Andrews University. He's shown that there is a link between how good members of a primate species are at manipulating one another -cheating on mates, stealing food - and the size of their brains. The bigger the better. Humans, it seems, have the biggest brains because we are the biggest cheats and liars. . . .

Researchers have found that the natural leaders in a playground proved to be the kids who are also better at deceiving their playmates. And here's a handy hint to bear in mind. The best deceivers did two things while they were spinning their yarns: they were very serious and they looked their dupes in the eye all the time.

We once had a President who pledged to never lie, and he probably did lie less than the norm for a politician. Jimmy Carter. He wasn't very successful at foreign policy.

Perhaps I missed that point entirely; perhaps I choose not to address it from a lack of knowledge; perhaps my horoscope advised me not to concern myself with it.

Yes, that's why I asked. I don't know why. I have made no guesses.

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It would be the very height of error to derive information from the silences between my sentences.

That's why I didn't. I derived no information. I was puzzled, so I asked.

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You might as well ask why I haven't mentioned anything about the guard dogs, and their peculiar behavior in the night-time.
Silas

Non-sequitur. I asked because I don't know why you chose to solely address one of two parts of the same statement that could be called lies. It seems odd to me, because even if everything you've claimed about "under fire" were still true, it would be completely irrelevent if the running to the cars part was untrue: her account would still be a lie and your defense would be pointless. So I was stumped. I have no clue where you got the idea I was making any inferences about why you didn't mention it....how did you get that from anything I wrote?

I remember landing under sniper fire. There was supposed to be some kind of a greeting ceremony at the airport, but instead we just ran with our heads down to get into the vehicles to get to our base

This is an out-and-out lie. There are no two ways about it.

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CBS, whose correspondent also attended the trip, said Mrs Clinton had "greatly misstated" what happened. The news network added: "There was no sniper fire either when Clinton visited two army outposts, where she posed for photos. And no sniper fire back at the base, where she sang in a USO show starring Sinbad and Sheryl Crowe."

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Mrs Clinton insisted yesterday that she had simply misspoken, characterising the false claim as a “minor blip” among the “millions of words” she spoke every day.

It is not a "blip", it is a lie! Any retraction that does not include the words "I was wrong" or "I made it up" makes the lie even worse. Arguing over what counts as sniper fire and what counts as running is just buying into the lie.

She is starting to show her true colours and a clear message needs to be sent to politicians that lying to the constituents is not on.